Céline

A film going deeper than I expected, possibly too deep for some, into the human condition and, what surprised me in a work from such a secular country, beyond.

Rich and single in her early twenties in the French countryside, completely shattered by a string of traumatic events and collapsed weeping in the street, Céline is rescued by the village nurse Geneviève, divorced in her early twenties but one who has surmounted her own traumas and has the gifts to heal not just bodies but also troubled minds. After first getting Céline back into the normal routines of life, making the beds and cooking the lunch, she then initiates her into yogic exercices and meditation.

Here the story moves to another plane as unrealised gifts in Céline emerge. Not only is she healed but in her journey towards the infinite finds that her powers heal others. In traditional Catholic terminology she has become a saint whose presence produces spontaneous miracles beyond scientific explanation. While Geneviève remains well earthed, Céline departs to join some nuns in Asia.

Not the sort of plot one expects from contemporary France, shot through with a feel for beauty and enriched by magnificent music from Georges Delerue.

This is Jean Claude Brisseau's most beautiful film. Perhaps not the best, but for sure the one who contains more beauty. The character of Celine, quite mysterious, with a past that we barely know and a present of sadness, distress and suicidal tendencies will become the purest of Brisseau's career, the maximum aspiration of a director such interested in magic as a part of our lives, as something that is there, in every corner and that can save (or corrupt) our entire existence. Lisa Heredia, as the nurse, pragmatic and quite, represents the other point of view if we are not able to watch the film in his right sense. It's her and his capacity to believe what makes possible the impossible. Marvellous musical interludes from Georges Delerue and a superb cinematography by the not well known but great Romain Winding.

There are terrible movies in this world like Simon Sez and Spice World the movie; then there is Céline by a guy named Brisseau. Most guys were in love at least once with a woman named Céline or related to a hot chick carrying that very same name; still, also this will not make you feel any better about this movie, as it goes so slowly that it barely contains the transmission of any comprehensible storyline whatsoever, and then of course you wonder why you are really still busy watching the screen which is transmitting nothing but the bore of a cold evening in Autumn. Surely the nudity should be making you feel better in this flick, but it won't make much difference as it is not exciting enough to arouse even the slightest of those inner feelings one likes to describe as motherly love in a Freudian Oedipus-world. And that, my friends, really conveys all I have to say about this utterly disappointing tearjerker of a film called "Céline" by a man named Brisseau, someone I hope I won't have to see any other title of during these next following years -though exceptions might still continue to exist somewhere in a far land under certain strict conditions, that much is sure-.